


Potential

by NienteZero



Category: Leverage
Genre: Vignette, the future job
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 11:29:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7638334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NienteZero/pseuds/NienteZero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A couple of short vignettes from Parker and Nate's point of view during a particular scene in the Future Job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Potential

_Parker: Cut off his arms. And his head. Yeah. I wanna kill him. Can we make that happen?_

_Eliot: Yeah. I can... I mean, I could..._

_(The Future Job)_

Parker has never felt this torn open before. She's good at what she does. She's good at putting things in boxes, making a safe no one can crack and putting all her feelings in it. It's not difficult to be detached. All you have to do is pay attention to what's real and ignore everything else. She'd been afraid of the dark, so she'd gone down into the ground and learned what the dark was and wasn't, and she wasn't afraid any more. She was never afraid of falling, because she knew down to the smallest measure what her gear could hold and what the wind would do.

But that man, Dalton Rand, he had cheated, he had cheated and blown a hole into the locked place where she kept her memories of Nick. Her chest feels tight and her face feels hot and she can't stop all the sharp, stabbing images of the past that make everything an open wound, like something is coming apart in her body. It's impossible, unbearable. People can see her weakness shining like the seams on a badly welded vault.

She knows, she's always known, that you have to keep yourself safe. No one else is going to do it, that isn't how things work. How can you keep yourself safe if everyone knows how to get into you?

She wants Rand dead. She wants him taken apart and taken out. She wants to know if they can just kill him.

Eliot doesn't hesitate to say yes.

And for all that Parker is bleeding her feelings all over the room, that's a new piece of information to turn around in her head and look at from all the angles. Later. After Nate works out the nastiest way to destroy Rand.

* * *

 

Those who know who Nate Ford is fear him all the more because he's the man who holds Eliot Spencer's leash.

That's the way they play it in front of the bad guys. Nate knows he's privileged to be one of the few people that Eliot will listen to, one of the tiny handful who can change his mind if he's decided on a course of action. But he also knows that the only person holding Eliot back from being the killer he was, is Eliot Spencer.

Eliot is a man in tight control of his own potential for violence. There's not much that can challenge his control and push him over the line.

But as Nate looks around the room now, looks at Parker crying like a pre-Raphaelite tragedy, looks at Hardison helpless in the face of Parker's uncharacteristic despair, he can see that his crew is suffering under an enormous weight. The kind that makes people do rash things.

Nate isn't the man who holds Eliot Spencer's leash. But he is the man who can provide his team with an alternative. Who can give them leverage.


End file.
